Ngahue IV - "Young man, your clock is up the creek"

(An imaginary discussion with a grumpy old passenger this morning)

"Now see here young man, that clock of yours is completely balmy", he exploded as the night sky slowly turned light grey.

"No, no", I answered; "It's keeping perfect time; it hasn't run a second faster or slower since Tortola! Good German quality, our ship's clock..."

"Don't you give me any of that nonsense; you can see perfectly well that something's amiss! When did you ever see dawn at half past three in the morning? Don't tell me the sun is rushing ahead on its schedule...; ...wants to finish its day early and knock off for a quick one at the pub? Typical of the younger generation... harumph, harumph", retorted and grumbled my imaginary elderly guest. "Not like in the good old days! You could count on the sun then."

At this point in our imaginary conversation (above is only a condensed version of it), I thought of Mark's word of wisdom at the skippers' briefing: "Remember the the Azores are UTC". And we had been in UTC -3 in Bermuda.

"What's this poppycock about UTC?" continued my guest, as his discontent flaring up again. "Different Time zones, who do you think I am, Dr Who??? And where has my good old Greenwich gone to? Harmonised away by that lot in Brussels?? So what are you going to do about it?"

We haven't touched our ship's clock since Tortola, so we are still on UTC-3. And our hourly log entries are done according to UTC-3 (with UTC times indicated in a separate column). There was a mix-up on board yesterday as I was referring to charging the batteries using ship's time, and Laura thought I was referring to UTC, which is prominently displayed on one of our Furuno instruments. She therefore thought I'd decided not to charge the batteries after all and put her computer back.
So we're now jockeying between the two time zones on board, although it is weird to look at the ship's clock and see a sunrise at 4 a.m. Perhaps we should change that clock anyway, and leave two or three lines blank in the log... Try explaining that to 'the authorities' afterwards: "And what, sir, were you doing during the two hours for which you have no log entries???"

I will end all these imaginary conversations by reporting that there seems to be another beautiful day in the making - and we're heading straight for Horta at a nice turn of speed...

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